Bret Stephens: History casts shadow on hope for summit's success

Thursday

Jun 14, 2018 at 5:00 AM

An optimistic take on Donald Trump’s historic meeting Tuesday with Kim Jong Un is that it’s Geneva Redux — a reprise of the 1985 summit between Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that established their rapport and led within a few years to the end of the Cold War.

Let’s hope so. Because another take is that it’s the Plaza Redux, meaning the 1988 real estate debacle in which Trump hastily purchased New York’s Plaza Hotel because it looked like an irresistible trophy, only to be forced to sell it at a loss a few years later as part of a brutal debt restructuring.

The case for Geneva Redux, made this week by Peter Beinart in The Atlantic, sees parallels between Trump and Reagan — Republican presidents whose hawkish rhetoric and ignorance of policy details disguised an inner pragmatism and visionary imagination.

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‘‘Trump’s lack of focus on the details of denuclearization may be a good thing,’’ Beinart writes. ‘‘Like Reagan, he seems to sense that the nuclear technicalities matter less than the political relationship.’’

It’s true that Reagan was able to raise his sights to something few others could see. To wit: The Cold War didn’t need to last forever. Personal chemistry with a Soviet leader could go a long way to changing the relationship.

Could the same scenario unfold with North Korea? Probably not — for reasons that would have been obvious to most conservatives before their current Trump derangement.

Second, Kim isn’t Gorbachev. Gorbachev was born into a family that suffered acutely the horrors of Stalinism. Kim was born into a family that starved its own people. Gorbachev came to office intent on easing political repression at home and defusing tensions with the West. Kim spent his first six years doing precisely the opposite.

Third, Kim knows what happened to Gorbachev, whose spectacular fall served as a lesson to dictators everywhere about the folly of attempting to reform a totalitarian system. The survival of Kim's regime depends domestically on state terror and internationally on his nuclear arsenal. He will abandon neither.

Fourth, the timetables are incompatible. Trump wants a foreign policy ‘‘achievement’’ by the midterms, and maybe a Nobel Peace Prize sometime before the 2020 election. Kim plans to be ruling North Korea when one of Chelsea Clinton’s kids is president.

Fifth, Trump is a sucker. Kim is not. Say what you will about the North Korean despot, but consolidating power, fielding a credible nuclear arsenal, improving his economy without easing political controls, playing nuclear brinkmanship with Trump and then, within weeks, getting the prestige of a superpower summit are political achievements of the first order.

As for Trump, the supposed success of the summit after the debacle in Quebec appeals to his innate love of drama. He is where he loves to be: at the center of a stunned world’s attention.

But he is also in the place where he always gets himself, and everyone else in his orbit, into the worst trouble: panting for the object of his desire. That’s been true whether it’s the Plaza Hotel, Stormy Daniels and now the ‘‘ultimate deal’’ with Pyongyang. Oilman T. Boone Pickens had the smartest line on this when on Monday he tweeted: ‘‘Negotiating advice 101. When you want to make a deal real bad you will make a really bad deal.’’

I would be thrilled to learn that Kim is a farsighted reformer masquerading as a thug and a swindler. It would also be nice to think Trump is playing geopolitical chess at a level plodding pundits can scarcely conceive.

For now, however, it’s hard to see what the Singapore summit has achieved other than to betray America’s allies, our belief in human rights, our history of geopolitical sobriety and our reliance on common sense. For what? A photo op with a sinister glutton and his North Korean counterpart?

Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist. Email him at newsservice@nytimes.com.

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